Does someone know where I can find benchmarks for graphic cards under linux (I mean test results, not applications for benchmarking) ? I guess watching benchmarks under windows can't give any idea of performances under linux because of difference of quality beetweem proprietary drivers...

I remember when AMD was still ATI, proprietary drivers of nvidia cards had really better performances and less problems....What about it now ?

About proprietary drivers again : is there a difference about the duration a card is supported by proprietary drivers beetweem nvidia and AMD ?
I'd like to buy a new graphic card but I'm scared that in 1 year I see a message in my xorg.log saying my graphic card is too old to be supported by proprietary drivers.Buying a cheap graphic card (like 45$) can lead to that problem faster than with a more expensive graphic card, right ? Buying a nvidia card is "safer" ?

I bought a motherboard less then 2 years ago with an integreted AMD graphic card which is now not supported by proprietary drivers.(radeon HD 3000)
I can really tell that switching to free drivers gives really higher performances on 2D games/desktop usage.But any application using anything 3D is really laggy or doesn't work at all...
Any idea of how to configure xorg/something else to have better performances using free drivers ?

They do benchmarking at phoronix.com - and I believe that some of the phoronix benchmarks are available in portage. The source(s) there can be a bit dramatic, and the forums can be full of fanbois, but there's information there, too._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

If you care about 3D acceleration with any sort of decent speed, you'll have to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers. As of today, they still support all the way back to the TNT2 (a late 90s era card), so it's fairly safe to say that your hardware will die before the software stops supporting it.

I wouldn't suggest using the proprietary Radeon drivers, they're buggy at best and will drop support for your card within a year or two.

Ya know, sometimes there isn't a good choice, and you do the best you can. I wonder where RMS' anti-nVidia sign is at? I actually sympathize with RMS some (maybe even much, just not nearly as avidly) of the time, and think that it is very important that someone like him is taking these stands. I would count him as a real and legitimate activist, not a fanboy.

But as for "real fanbois," I was thinking more of the guy who called me a "'tard" because I though X11 network transparency was important. I guess the fact that I work in silicon development and need to do extensive X redirection daily (You go wherever you need to, to get the horsepower that isn't at your own desk, and I've gotten really used to GUI editors.) doesn't count as useful and makes me a fossil._________________.sigs waste space and bandwidth

If you care about 3D acceleration with any sort of decent speed, you'll have to use the Nvidia proprietary drivers. As of today, they still support all the way back to the TNT2 (a late 90s era card), so it's fairly safe to say that your hardware will die before the software stops supporting it.

I wouldn't suggest using the proprietary Radeon drivers, they're buggy at best and will drop support for your card within a year or two.

The open source Radeon drivers are in better shape than the open source Nvidia drivers, but both are slower than their proprietary counterparts (sometimes by large margins).

Thanks, that's all what I needed to know.
I really hate AMD for this, I was able to run games like WOW with all max details/resolution since they stopped supporting my card...(forced to use old xorg + old kernel to keep my old proprietary driver...- ok could be worse with a debian stable )
Anyway, maybe there will be nice radeon free drivers supporting 3D in a few years.(I hope for AMD card users)

Now after reading all gentoo documentation about xorg, radeon, kernel...UT-2004 Demo gives me 10 FPS with max details and 25FPS with lower details...

They do benchmarking at phoronix.com - and I believe that some of the phoronix benchmarks are available in portage. The source(s) there can be a bit dramatic, and the forums can be full of fanbois, but there's information there, too.

Thanks, this link is really usefull.I spent so much time googling without finding this !

I had once brought and own an ATI card for 3 days before sending it back. I brought it the day it went out, full prize, one top card, for ~500$ (yep, that was the one and only time i spent that much money on a 3D card).
The drivers wasn't handling it on linux, only windows ones. While by this time, my currently install nvidia drivers was already handling the newest nvidia cards.
So that kick ass top ATI card was running in vesa (!), and after getting (grrrr, cost me money) the latest nvidia card (but it was running slower than the ATI, well, on paper, as you can imagine how the ATI was running in vesa), i didn't even need to update the drivers and it was working.

Today, i do honestly think ATI hardware still looks better than nvidia, card are smaller, taking less space and slot, less power eaten, and less heat. But their drivers are something any computer related company should be ashame of.

I never heard of that being a concern before. It looks like you have pcie 2.0 x16. The gtx 630 supports that. When I mentioned efficiency, I was talking nvidia kepler cards. I haven't done any comparison research on pre kepler cards.

The card has on board memory. I didn't see any reference to pcie bus size and I don't know that matching bus size to bus size is even a thing beyond matching pcie 4x/8x/16x 2.0/3.0, etc. Where are you getting your info?

Looks like they used a bad translation of the specifications which leads to a misunderstanding.

But you're right, instead of looking for that on Asus website, I should have better go to Nvidia website.

And they even tell the minimum power requirement ! I was scared for my 350W power not to be enough...
(but the good thing for this website is the fact it's cheapier than most from my country and it sends faster the stuff)